[Email-SIG] Thread support and XML output request

[Brett C.]

Late last week I wrote a script to calculate what people and threads 
have caused me the most amount of work on the python-dev Summaries.  I 
initially thought of using the email package, but I had the problem of 
needing to know what emails contributed to a thread.  I did not see that 
in the email package and so I just parsed the Mailman archive page in 
thread view to garner that info.

Now I would like to not have to do HTML parsing to figure this kind of 
thing out.  Obviously Mailman has an algorithm to figure out what emails 
belong in a thread.  Any chance of getting a similar algorithm added to 
the email package?

And on top of this I think it would be nice to have a standardized XML 
format for emails.  Yes, you can just read the mbox file and pass it to 
the email package, but why go through all of that parsing of data and 
such when you could do it once and then dump the parsed data to XML? 
And if threading was supported it would serve as a great way of storing 
that info instead of having to recalculate all of that for every read of 
the mbox.  Mailman could, for instance, just provide an XML output of 
its parsed email info so that poor folks like me don't have to parse the 
HTML pages to get info.

Now whether any of this is practical is beyond me; I am just a simple 
email user who probably has non-typical needs.  But it sure would be 
nice to have.  =)

-Brett